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Infection

A man lies on a hospital bed. Will he succumb to his affliction, or will his body triumph over infection in the battle that rages beneath the surface?

NOTE: if you're experiencing frame rate issues, we've compiled a slightly lower quality version for you to try here http://bit.ly/S8tjB8

//// INSTRUCTIONS ////
Prevent the infection from spreading by killing the viruses before they reach the chamber exit. Collect the cells from the dead viruses to upgrade your character and purchase towers to aid you in battle.

[[WASD or Arrows]] to move
[[Mouse click]] to Shoot.
[[Spacebar]] to access Shop.

[[Mouse click and Drag]] to Setup a tower and rotate it towards the mouse.
_________________________________________________________________________

This is very impressive for a Ludum Dare game! I got to the second stage, and saved the ailing patient for another 50 years, 7 days. I definitely could have spent more time playing this game, and I think I will revisit it if I have time later.

Here are my observations:
-The controls and feel of the game are very polished, including things like great sound design, screenshake, and other features which make shooting enemies a pretty satisfying experience. This is a surprising amount of quality to find in a 72 hour game.
-Sometimes it feels like the player fires just a liiiiittle bit off from where I was aiming, which could be a minor calibration issue or it could have something to do with how it's a little bit difficult to distinguish the reticle from the ground. I think you should add some contrast to it so it's easier to keep track of where you're aiming.
-The art, sound, and overall aesthetic polish are really remarkable. Good work on all that.
-I wasn't quite sure what was causing the "Infections" counter to increase, which is probably a problem, although I bet it's my fault.
-From what I played it seemed like the enemies were mostly the same in terms of gameplay behavior, although it is impressive how you managed to get so much visual variety in the enemies.
-If the enemies in fact behave differently, it's probably not a good sign that I couldn't tell. You probably want your types of enemies to be clearly distinguishable in appearance and behavior, like the classes of TF2 which each have very distinct purpose and play style.

Like I said, this is just all of the critical feedback I could think of because I think honesty is really important for making improvement in the future. You really did an amazing job on this, so congratulations! It's also impressive that you did so much with just 2 people. I am interested to watch your art creation time lapses as well, since I'm a programmer and have little knowledge of such things. :)

waw, awesome amount of work here, great job :D
The idea of starting a new level without any upgrade you got from the last one is kinda frustrating, I don't know if there's a way of keeping some kind of bonus from one to another in the same playthrough.

This was amazing! The art is fantastic! I love the colors and the animations. They gameplay is also very awesome. Great store too. I love the background effect when you open the store. This is a full game here :) Great audio too :) Great job :D

for reply to your message, I don't know why some persons have some issue with shiva3D plugin.. We try to resolve it !
I think if you want try the game, you have to download the .exe ):
Sorry for this ..

Nice mix between tower defense and shooter genres.
Really polished for a 72 hours game, you should definitely make a post jam version of it.

Aiming at first was a bit difficult. On my pc the game's fps got down a lot when I built 5-6 towers and the central area got crowded, causing an huge input lag.
I still managed to make the guy live for 75 years and 190 days. :D

For those wondering why the infection number was increasing: monsters come from a door (two in the second level) and infection increase when they reach the door that don't spawn monsters.
It took me a couple losses before realizing that. You should include it in instructions.

Wow, really impressive! Absolutely beautiful, great sound, and really fun gameplay. This is really awesome work! I think with a bit of cleaning up (aiming seemed a bit too difficult) this could be really special. Seriously nice stuff!

What a remarkable game for a ludum dare jam...
Even tough optimization was quite lacking (runs really slow on my laptop), it's polished to an impressivel level.
And i was thinking "Well, it's impressive allright, but it's just a game about shooting a line of enemies"
And then, "use your cells to buy stuff"
Turrets.
Upgrades.
Tableflip. I quit.

Wow this is really well polished for a 72hour jam game :O Controls, physics, graphically, audio. Everything is just superb. You can even upgrade stuff! Definitely my favorite jam game so far! I really want to play this coop with controllers haha, would be so SICK, hah, get it, sick...

I can't believe how much quality this had, and best of all, the controls were actually good! I would have loved the target pointer to be above the enemies but overall it was pretty good and fun!
"Stage 1 completed" .__.

Whoa. Just. Wow. Like others have said, there seems to be some kind of issue with the aiming, but this is still near perfection. You should post it to a game website like Kongregate, this is pro stuff.

Aw man you're getting better and better at this :) Enjoyed playing it very much (kept me busy for half an hour!) I kept winning too quickly and I wanted to buy all the precious precious upgrades. Arrrrrrrrrrrr!

71 years, 258 days. Completed it haha. The game was really well done, mechanics felt nice. Just the shop breaking the pace of the game didn't feel really good. Furthermore I like the concept of virusses beneath the skin, but I think you could work it out a lil' more. Really great game though! I love the game over screen haha. Health packs are too cheap btw. ;D

Spectacular!
Really great job, I didn't like that the upgraded weapons swithced from auto-to semi automatic, kinda threw me. I liked the balance of having to choose to spend money on ammo vs upgrades & turrets. The heath meter coloring is a bit too subtle, i found myself dieing for dumb reasons because i didnt notice i was low on HP, other than that magnificent! fun, solid, polished, excellent entry

Incredible effort for 72 hrs! Wow, until the game ended suddenly I felt like I was playing a full release title. Great visuals, varied gameplay, all of it good. All I will pass criticism on is that it wasn't quite clear what the objectives were, how to win/fail etc. I did eventually clue onto the fact that those little guys were walking into a cave that upped the infection count, but it took me longer than it should have. Congrats all round though!

Pretty rad, the art style of the game is awesome, nice particles and shader, the music and sfx are cool, making all an overall good mix. I liked the interpretation of the theme as well.
I would have enjoyed a more clear variation in the enemy types and models. A little nice touch would have been to rotate the character when pointing with the mouse.
The infection mechanic is a little confusing (I'm not even sure if you could die just from infections), but, after all, I quite enjoyed the game, great entry!

The aiming seemed to be a bit off, and I was never quite sure if I really hit the enemies and if they were already dead or not. The world is at first sight pretty confusing, there should be arrows pointing to where the enemies will come from and where the "exit" door is. Other than that really impressive artwork and music for a LD entry.

Absolutely fantastic! I managed to get Dave to live 74 years and 301 days. After some upgrading in level 2 there were so many things on screen that it was a bit difficult to see :P Other than that it was awesome!

Pretty cool! Once I hit the second level the difficulty seem to fly up pretty quickly. It can be a little repetitive as well, as it basically becomes a "fire everything!" type of game. Still a bit of a thrill to run through once or twice though.

Wow, what a great game! Very impressive art and significant polish. Good take on the theme. Amazing work for 72 hours. Actually hitting the viruses can be a bit touchy until you start upgrading the weapon. Didn't really notice the tower I bought doing much of anything, but I might have just not been paying enough attention while being swarmed by viruses. I also fell out of the world at one point :)

Great polish, and some interesting mechanics with turret placement etc. Feels a bit easy being able to pause and buy at any time though, it'd be cool if there were specific places you had to go to do this (possibly moving so you can't turtle up in one corner with turrets) :)

Excellent work though, really love the graphics, lighting in particular!

Great work! Since you asked for thorough feedback, here are a few things I think you could do to improve the game:
1. The hit reacts are great, but the death reaction looks very similar, so that when something dies I usually shoot it several more times until I realize it's dead. I'd recommend doing some manner of drastic, immediate feedback to say "this thing is dead don't waste bullets on it"
2. Placing turrets often got me killed! If you aren't going to have any breathers between waves that would be good for turret placing, consider auto-aiming the turrets so I can place them quickly, and not die in the process of trying to adjust them.
3. I didn't realize what the cell pickups were for a long time. I think the reason they didn't read as pickups is because there was so many things in the environment that were also glowing, so it didn't stand out.

The graphics are really well done! Gameplay was fun though seemed a bit standard. Feel like I can't give it a proper review since the rendering was just a little bit too costly for my poor outdated laptop.

I can't believe this was made in 48 hours! That's really awesome. I feel like it would have been better if ammo were unlimited because it always felt like I was buying more ammo and missing out on the cooler upgrades because of it. If ammo were free it would let players delve more into the really cool stuff.

Also, it felt like the aiming was just off, it didn't shoot where I was aiming it shot a little... "above" in the z-dimension or something, since we're looking at a bit of an angle.

Solid entry! Had a lot of fun playing, feels very complete.
While regular turrets didn't feel terribly useful, all the other turrets were very much so, and perhaps should have been a little more expensive; after placing about 3 or 4, I suddenly found myself with very little to shoot at :/
Keep up the good work! Look forward to your next entry!

Wow, a lot more polished that I'd ever expect from a LD game. Not the type of game I'm particularly good at, I must admit, but I enjoyed it, especially with the level of progression and upgrades available. My one gripe (and I'm probably an anomaly on this) is that I'd like a bit more narrative, especially considering the initial premise of a man lying on a hospital bed, fighting vigorously against the infection inside him. I don't mean make it sentimental or anything, just give the theme some weight as opposed to it being a superficial element that plays host to an admittedly-polished-but-nevertheless-generic top-down shooter. However, I didn't manage to finish the game, so maybe I speak too soon. Oh, and I completely forgot to mention that the sound is really bloody good.

Can't add much to comments above about how amazing this production was!

Sadly, I will say it desperately needs a "turn down the graphics" option -- basically un-playable on my (admittedly rather antiquated) laptop -- that may also be why I couldn't seem to hit anything (lagging hit detection?) (but only knocked off 1 fun star for this). Will retry on a more beefy Linux machine later if time.

Loved the "behind the scenes" video! Next: watch all your vids, learn all your tricks and see you next time!

The game works really well and was a lot of fun to play. I played it about 5-6 times. I have a few suggestions:

The dates on the tombstone don't quite make sense, unless he was born on the day you start playing - I know it's to show the amount of time you lasted, but it's still odd.

I think the cells should probably be drawn to you instead of needing to collect them. If you're going to have to stop the game to buy things, I think that allows for better flow.

Other than that, I felt the targeting was a little off and the game should probably pause as you place turrets since you can't place any before the game begins.

It's an incredibly polished game for 72 hours and I could easily see this as a regular indie bundle kind of game. The visuals are nice and the soundtrack is solid. Also the sound effects actually match the soundscape so I'm a fan of that.

Keep going, thanks for sharing, and thanks for commenting on my game! :D

This is clearly going to be one of the top-ranking Jam games this LD. It has a ton of polish, from graphics and sound to powerups and features. There are even multiple levels! I really wasn't expecting there to be so much more from a game that already looked so good, but there you go.

Although it's not the most innovative game, it blends top-down shooting with tower defense--a mix I haven't seen before, or at least not very often--in a streamlined & fun manner, and provides enough varied items from the shop to keep things interesting all the way through. I don't have much else to say but "great job"! Good luck in the rankings! :)

I'm impressed by the level of polish, from the graphics to the power-ups and turrets.
Cool blend of arcade shooting and tower defense game.

I think that the game becomes unbalanced to the player's favor when you buy the second weapon upgrade, and the enemies seems samey. But for a LD, your game is a superb entry. A huge improvement from your last entry, the beat'em up game.

Great graphics - and I adore the lighting and the color choice! The shooting gameplay was fun, although it sometimes felt like the aim was off which made it a bit more frustrating. I like that you added the tower defense aspect there, but aaah - why can't the time stop when I place towers? Sometimes I just died when I tried to place one, haha. Also for some reason (probably because everything is so glowy) I totally forgot to collect the little cells at the beginning! Apart from those troubles though, I had a lot of fun playing this game. Great job!

Very impressive for the amount of time available! It was a bit chaotic for a number of reasons. For one, the aiming felt sloppy. So I was never quite sure if I was going to hit what I was aiming at. Perhaps this was a lag issue. Visually very cluttered due to the size of elements on the screen and a lot of noisy color information. This made it difficult to keep track of what was going on. Frequently I would just "spray and pray". When placing turrets, the action needs to slow down or pause. You never get breaks in which to make strategic decisions like that, so placing a turret often means that you'll need to refill your health right after. I did manage to beat the game, but it felt like that had little to do with skill and mostly to do with leveling up as quickly as possible so that my random shooting would be remotely effective. I'm only writing a long critique because this game is so well put together. A very strong effort that could be fantastic with some careful rework.

Fantastic little game! Second level pumps up the difficulty a bit - They barely got passed the entrance in the first level :p Assets well polished, shooter mechanics solid. Only complaints are the cells can get lost in a mass of enemies and turret effects, and wasn't fully clear what the turrets actually did - Even after deploying them. Great final product overall!

Really nice work! Impressive to see a great idea combined with great execution and polish :) I would prefer if you disabled the right-click menu in the web player since I accidentally pressed full screen several time, but maybe that's just me. Anyway, awesome!

Ha! I finally defeated every virus! I won!!
...
Wait, that was only level 1? O_O
Level 2 got way harder... I got to 10 years and 300 and a few days...

Pretty fun game! It's amazing how polished it is. It felt like a normal game, not a jam one! It's probably the best game I've played so far (and that I'll play in this edition)!

Well, on to feedback about the game...
- I don't think shooting shouldn't be random, or there should be and upgrade to fix this... it's the basic well to get cells, before putting any turret... it shouldn't make you randomly miss.
- I was able to break level 1. I used 1 turret to aggro every enemy and another one to kill them. Then I just had to keep evading (and bringing them near the turret) until I had enough cells to buy better/more turrets. Still, it was really fun!

Hey there! Finally managed to play this game, and I gotta say - I am AMAZED! The amount of stuff you guys managed to put in the game is simply unbelievable, together with pretty solid art and polish. The music also fits well, and the overall SFX is very competent. Seriously, dudes. This is amazing!

On the constructive criticism side, I think it would be better if level 1 was way slower and easier, so that people have some time to get used to character control / aiming / looking at ammo and health / collecting cells and buying stuff and pretty much understanding what is going on before actually having to face real difficulty. Kinda like a hands on tutorial disguised as level 1, you know?

Also, the art style and execution is GREAT (as always, it seems, you rock at this, man!), but I think it could be tweaked a bit for gameplay clarity purposes. In a nutshell, I think you could color code the gameplay relevant stuff in a very distinct way (specially the avatar, the enemies and the cells, which are the things that you have to spot quickly in the middle of the action in order to play), and make them always visible (maybe they could emit light to highlight them from the scenery?).

These minor feedbacks apart, this is clearly one of the best games I have played in this LD. Congratulations! :D

PS.: We GOTTA jam together eventually. Just way till we're more comfortable working with Unity. ;)

Very good game, thanks for tipping me off to it. I did have to go with the lower build due to framerate, but I won't really hold that against you.

I really liked this game, my one complaint would be that after beating a level you are forced to go to the next one (it would have been cool to see how crazy you could get) that and when you die in level 2 there is no level select to start at level 2. I get why because then it would feel like the game over screen means less (clever idea btw), but that would have been nice.

The other suggestion I would have is that tower defense time games usually have "pleasant time" where it's either paused when you are picking where to place your building or there is a break between waves. Placing turrets while being attacked was a bit annoying, but that said some people like frantic gameplay I like gameplay where there is more deliberateness to it. Same thing for the health, if you want the game frantic then your eyes have to keep going down and checking your health (unless you want to waste cells on healing after taking only 20% damage), but for me this is more chaotic than fun, but I think that's a personal preference thing.

All of that said, this game is really well made and impressive considering the time limit and stuff, it looks nice, it's innovative, and it's fun. So good job! :)

Very impressive entry, high levels of polish in all areas, particularly the sounds & graphics. It was sometimes difficult to tell what was going on as the screen would get very busy between my weapons, turrets, and enemies. Very impressive work!

Losing all of my cells and weapon upgrades made round two almost impossible to beat for me. Otherwise this was a great game. Looked great, and aside from a bit of lag in the aiming it felt great too. Awesome stuff.

I don't typically hand out five star ratings, but this game was worthy in a few categories. This actually kind of has me hooked, wish I was laying on the couch, playing it on my Xbox One with a controller, I'd pay money for this (HINT HINT HINT HINT).

Wow. That is one impressive game! It looks like you guys are both top notch. My only gripes are that it is difficult to see if an enemy was hit and the player fires one shot in his current direction before rotating. Besides that, this is an excellent 72 hour game.

Great job with the game ! I could only get him to live almost 3 years, it was too hard man ! Sometimes the bullets got through the enemies, I'm not sure why, but you have a lot of mechanics done already and that's impressive!

Had a whole boat load of fun playing. Went very quickly from a standard shooter to an upgrade FPS/Tower Defense. Maybe add some more enemy abilities and I think you can easily sell this on places like steam.

See more info on my playthrough for Ludum Dare Showcase vol 4! http://youtu.be/aFa_iU1gvTg

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